You CAN teach your child to be organized through the use of these three Organization Tips and five Organization Ideas.

If your child is chronically disorganized, it can be a real challenge for your child to be successful in school.

Organizational skills are not typically taught in school, so your child will benefit if you step in to help with these organization tips.

Three Essential Organization Tips for Organized Kids:

The main skills you need to teach your child to help him become more organized include –

Organization Tip #1: Use established routines for every day practices to build habits.

For example, your child needs to use the same process each day to gather his books, assignments, and other items for his school day at the beginning and ending of each school day. Teaching your child a regimented routine for the start and end of his school day will build in a habit of organization.

Organization Tip #2: Use checklists to complete routine tasks.

You’ll have to help your child mindfully engage with the checklist by verbally coaching him through the list each day until using the checklist becomes a habit. While this may seem like the same task as establishing a routine, it is a bit different. Using the checklist(s) should become part of your child’s routine as established in #1 above.

A child with organizational difficulties usually lacks a natural ability to see how to divide big assignments into smaller chunks. Again, you will need to work directly with your child, verbally coaching him through the division of assignments into smaller steps. You’ll need to help him write down each step on a schedule so he’ll be able to make progress each day without waiting until the last moment.

2) Daily Academic Planner – Your child will need help learning how to divide up large assignments among the days from the date given through the due date.

Children with organizational and planning difficulties seldom know how to break a big task up into smaller subtasks. You will have to help your child with this process repeatedly until he learns to do it himself.

You can use an academic planner to schedule work and to note assignment due dates. Teaching my boys how to segment big assignments into smaller steps has helped them immensely throughout high school, especially with their dual enrollment courses.

3) Velcro Binders – If your child is like mine, his notebook comes home as a scattered jumble of papers stashed loosely in his bookbag. Papers fall out of an ordinary notebook and easily get damaged or lost.

We found notebooks with zippered or velcroed closures help the papers make the journey between home and school without getting lost. Additionally, letting each of my boys pick out a “cool” binder at the beginning of the school year helped with their usage compliance.

4) Pocket Page Protectors – These are great for your child’s checklists for his different routines. Having a pocket protector keeps the paper nice without tearing the holes and getting messed up.

The plastic surface allows your child to use a dry erase marker to check off completed items, then the surface can be wiped clean for the next day’s use. When a page protector reaches a point where it needs to be replaced, you can often swap it for a new protector and use the same checklist paper. If you use a paper checklist without a page protector, you will likely have to make a new copy of the checklist frequently.

5) Stackable Drawers or Bins – Label each drawer with a different subject or by “Homework To Be Done,” “Assignments in Progress” and “Homework Finished.” Having the stack of drawers near your child’s homework spot lets him come home, put his homework papers in the “To Be Done” drawer, then move it to the other drawers when he completes the assignment. When he’s done, he can grab the stack of completed papers and put them in his velcro binder. Having the intermediate drawer helps for assignments that take multiple days to finish.

When we began homeschooling, we used the Sterilite ClearView stackable drawers. We chose to buy two sets of three and stack them for a six-drawer stack. We then labeled each drawer with the individual subjects. Each of my sons had a stack of six drawers next to his desk.

It might interest you to know that we were able to successfully teach our boys with these organizational tips and by teaching them planning skills. This is a feat we are particularly proud of since my youngest was deemed “The Human Tornado” when he was young. He was anything but organized, but consistent teaching over multiple years enabled him to become organized throughout his teen years. Now he’s more organized than I am!! Maybe I need someone to walk me through organization each day.

I’d say organizational skills are among the most difficult to establish when a child is highly disorganized. Learning to use routines, checklists, and breaking big tasks into small, manageable steps requires direct instruction for months or years. Good organization ability is not a skill that is learned overnight.

That said, once a child learns to rely upon routine, checklists, and planning of his assignments, he will reach a point where he incorporates these tools and practices into his everyday life management. The skills are well worth teaching both for your child’s schooling and for his long-term success in life.

Are you struggling to manage your home organization, homeschooling, housework and/or meeting the needs of multiple children?

Whether it is YOUR home organization skills at issue, or your children’s, using a “system” for both you and your children can help your home and homeschool run more smoothly. You can learn home organization skills a little at a time. Every technique and skill you learn will contribute to your overall home organization over time.

Let’s look at Home Organization separately from your homeschooling management.

Homeschool Planning – Academics

One of the biggest issues new homeschool parents have is planning and management of their students’ academic program.

If you purchase a pre-planned or comprehensive curriculum, the package often comes with a schedule for the teaching parent. If so, you have the organization of the program already laid out for you.

However, if you want to use a variety of curricula sources, and need to lay out your child’s lesson plans, it is beneficial to have a form you can use to plan out which assignments your child will do each day. After using a variety of planning forms, I’ve created my own form. The form is in a Word Document format. It is modifiable to suit your own needs. This form is a useful tool for you to use in beginning to lay out your own child’s schoolwork. It is available as a free download here.

**Everyday Education – Homeschool Through High School with easy to use resources, Transcripts Made Easy, a Jump Start On College, and more.

For many children with learning difficulties, particularly those with ADHD or executive functioning disorder, organization of papers is often an issue. Organization skills require a lot of direct teaching and reinforcement.

A child must be taught an organization method. He must be taught how to file papers, where to put papers, where to place books and notebooks. Placement must be consistent, and checked daily or more frequently by a parent/teacher. Often, rewards must be put into place for reinforcement.

With my child, we made daily checklists with every assignment or required effort listed. Initially, I would check his list multiple times per day to be sure he was checking off each completed item. As he began to “remember” to check off items, I began checking his checklist at the end of each day. From there we moved to checking it once per week, as long as assignments were being turned in as listed.

Once my child consistently checked off his own work, and had obviously embraced the organization system, we began working on filing assignments behind each tab when completed. It took us nearly a whole school year to reach a point where our child would check off work without prompting.

Whatever system you use, make sure it makes sense to your child. Make sure it isn’t too difficult to manage. I created my own system using the planning documents shared in the opening of this article. We bought a “Trapper Keeper” zippered notebook so that pages would fall out. If you would like a ready-made system, you might consider the Super Study Skills Binder System. I received a complimentary copy of this system for review. You have the option of buying the “full” binder system including the binder, paper, dividers, etc., or the purchasing the heart of the system which includes the organizational forms and a teaching DVD.

Regardless of whether you buy a ready made system like the Super Study Skills Binder System or create your own notebook and system, it will require constant monitoring and teaching in the beginning. Once your child becomes organized, it is a huge relief. Becoming more organized is a skill that will serve your child well throughout the rest of his life!

Homeschool Management – Multiple Children

For parents with multiple children, figuring out how to meet each child’s needs can be a challenge.

Depending on the ages of your children, how you approach teaching management across your multiple age groups can vary quite a bit. The variety of personalities involved can introduce all kinds of challenges too.

If your children are close in age and academic ability, then you can opt to work with your children simultaneously—same subject, same level of instruction for more than one child.

If your children are using the same or similar curricula, your life can be easiser. If the assignments can be given so that each child works at his or her own level of ability that helps too. Teaching your children simultaneously can be very beneficial to you. Teaching your children together reduces the length of your school day, which in turn allows more time for activities and fun.

Some parents have concerns about group instruction holding one child back or advancing another. However, each child gains an understanding of the material equal to his cognitive ability. This type of group instruction works best for science, social studies, and literature where the children are relatively close in age. It also only tends to work for content-based subjects. It does not work well for skills based subjects like learning to read, write, and math computation.

Managing multiple children can seem overwhelming, especially in the beginning. As you try different ways of managing your children’s learning, you are likely to find a way that works for you.

Home Organization of your HOME

Oh the books and papers and laundry and lack of home organization… It is definitely difficult to maintain your household when your home is also a full-time school! When your home is also a full-time family living environment, home organization can seem like an impossible or never-ending task.

Any level of task delegation, home organization, and planning you can use will benefit you and your entire family. In our household, aside from carefully planning our schooling, using chore charts and meal planning has helped lighten my personal load.

When your kids are young, give them small daily jobs to do. Give small jobs like picking up their own toys, which will contribute to your home organization. As your children get older, give them more complex daily tasks–setting the table, collecting and carrying out the trash, clearing the table after dinner, feeding pets, etc. Having your kids pitch in and help with home organization makes the task much easier for you. This is especially true when your kids adopt responsibility for helping out.

For your convenience, here is a copy of a blank chore chart. There is also an example of the chore chart filled out as we used them in our household. The top chores with no monetary value were the child’s non-optional chores. The other chores were available for our guys to earn money. Our boys had a minimal number of optional chores that were required each month. The number of chores was equivalent to their age.

Home organization Includes Family Meal Planning

For family meal management, I sat down during the summer when I was lesson planning for the year and planned our meals for the year too. YES, for the YEAR! We have used this meal planning system for more than a decade. It is SO NICE not to have to think about “What’s for dinner?” each day.

Having our meals planned ahead of time made grocery shopping easier. It also allowed us to involve everyone in preparing meals because everyone in the family knew what was for dinner.

Our plans are not set in concrete (I write our plans in pencil). We can move meals around and change them as needed. If you’d like to use our meal planning method, I’ve written down the steps I took. At the request of my friends, I have created an inexpensive book explaining our method. It is called:

I’m not a home organization maven when it comes to keeping my whole household in order, so I’ll leave major advice in home organization up to another expert. However, I do hope this information about home organization is helpful to you. 😉

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This website is authored by Sandra Cook, who holds a Master's Degree in Instructional Design and Technology. The information provided within is educational in nature and designed to help you provide the best education possible for your child. If you need legal, psychological, or medical advice, please consult with a licensed lawyer, psychologist, or medical doctor. See the "Disclaimer, Terms of Use, and Legal Notification" link to the right of this notice for further information.